Category Archives: Announcements

The Society for the Study of American Women Writers has been working with U.S. Studies Online (http://usstudiesonline.com/) to help create a selection of posts to celebrate Women’s History Month in March. The collaboration includes USSO, the Society for the History of Women in the Americas (SHAW), and SSAWW.

Special thanks to Kristin Allukian, the lead on this project for SSAWW, as well as Susan K. Harris and Dick Ellis for their editorial support. And, a big thank you to Michelle Green at USSO for ushering us all through the process and providing us with this opportunity aimed to feature emerging scholars in the field of American women writers.

Please watch SSAWW’s social media for additional notifications about the series. We hope you will share and comment on the posts as they are released.

Best, Kristin

—
Kristin J. Jacobson
Associate Professor of American Literature, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Stockton University

Body: “The Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher network for the British Association for American Studies, U.S. Studies Online, is hosting a new online, real-time book group on twitter under the hashtag #bookhour.(more…)

If you have items you¹d like to see in the Fall 2014 SSAWW Newsletter, please send them to me at ssaww.web@gmail.com by September 25.

If you’re sending in a notice of a new book or article (and please do send these!), it would be helpful if you could include a link to the press’s page on your book (for books) and to put the article citations in MLA format (for articles).

Other items to send

–calls for papers for conferences, journal issues, edited collections, and so on

–conference announcements

–invitations to apply for grants and fellowships

–new books by SSAWW members

–new articles by SSAWW members

–reports from SSAWW regional study groups

–announcements of upcoming SSAWW regional study group meetings

–announcements of book prizes (either received or invitations to submit)

both attached in Word or rtf, and pasted into the body of the message.

The conference organizers welcome and encourage complete session submissions as well as individual paper abstract submissions. Affiliate associations and regional groups should follow the submission guidelines for complete session submissions.

Please Note: if not already a member of SSAWW, presenters must become SSAWW members once the paper is accepted.
Every attempt will be made to notify submitters of the status of their proposals by late May 2015 and to have the draft program in place by late June 2015.

Conference participants may appear on the program twice as presenters: once on a panel presenting a formal academic paper, and once in an additional way: for example, on a roundtable, as a respondent, or in a “professionalization” session.

Complete Panel Submission Guidelines:

The cfp for complete panel submissions can be posted on the SSAWW website in addition to other venues of your choice. For posting on the SSAWW website, please send cfp to: ssaww2015.web@gmail.com.

Complete sessions may take the form of panels or roundtables. A panel normally consists of three, preferably four presenters, who speak for approximately 15 minutes each with 15 minutes left for discussion. Roundtables consist of five or more participants who speak briefly (6-8 minutes), and emphasize discussion among themselves and with the audience.

The organizers welcome variations on and innovations in format within the allotted time frames. If you are proposing a different format for a complete session, please explain the format clearly, and state the rationale and benefits.

If submitting a complete session, please ensure that notifications go out by the end of January at the latest to those whose proposals are declined for the particular panel so that they can still submit individual paper abstracts by the conference submission deadline of February 13.

Email Header: Please put 1) “Complete Session” in the subject line, followed by a brief title (one to five words); 2) OR the name of the affiliate association; 3) OR the name of the regional group

Please include the following information for complete session proposals in the body of the email, as well as attached in Word or rtf.

Adapting the guidelines set out by the American Literature Association which facilitates the copying of accepted submissions directly into the program, we ask that you provide a summary of the panel information at the beginning of the submission in the following format, listing the session title, the chair and affiliation (if any), the organizer (if different from the chair), and affiliate association / group name (if any), and each of the presenters, citing name, affiliation (if any), and title of paper in quotation marks. Please turn off auto format to prevent automatic indenting. Commas separate the name, affiliation, and title, and there is no period at the end. Here is an example:

Gender and Print Culture
Chair: Mary Smith, Nu University
Organized by the North American Society of Women Scholars of Print Culture

In addition, please provide the following information:
– Contact person’s name and contact information: email and phone (to be used only if email fails)
– Title of session:
– Type of session: please indicate if this is a panel or roundtable, or please explain if you are proposing an alternate format
– Chair: name and affiliation (if any)
– Brief biography (60 word limit)
– Organizer’s name and affiliation (if any), and brief biography (60 word limit) if different from the Chair; or if the session is being organized by an affiliate association or regional group, please provide its name here
– Abstract overview of session submission (250 – 300 words)
– *A/V requirements: please indicate none or yes (please note that we recognize the need for audio visual support for some presentations, but ask that you consider its necessity carefully because of the high costs involved); if yes, please specify the equipment required.

Email Header: Please put “Individual Submission” in the subject line, followed by a brief title of the paper (one to five words)

In the body of the email, as well as attached in Word or rtf, please include the following:

To facilitate the copying of accepted submissions directly into the program, please provide the submission in the following format at the beginning of the submission:

Name, affiliation (if any), title of paper in quotation marks; the items are separated by commas and there is no period at the end.

Example:

Mary Smith, Nu University, “Empowered by Literature”

Then, please provide the following:

– Name and affiliation (if any)
– Email and phone contact (phone will only be used in the event of email failure)
– Title of paper:
– Abstract (250 – 300 words)
– *A/V requirements: please indicate none or yes (please note that we recognize the need for audio visual support for some presentations, but ask that you consider its necessity carefully because of the high costs involved); if yes, please specify the equipment required.
– Brief biography (60 word limit)

, both attached in Word or rtf, and pasted into the body of the message.
Please see the complete submission guidelines posted on the website.

For the 2015 Triennial Conference of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, the conference organizers welcome proposals on any topic related to the study of American women writers, broadly conceived. The strength of the society is rooted in the dynamic ideas and research accomplishments of its members, which the 2015 conference continues to facilitate and honor. As in the past, however, we would also like to take the opportunity that the conference affords to create discussions and conversations around a shared theme, which we have designated as

Liminal Spaces, Hybrid Lives.

The terms liminality and hybridity are most familiar in post-colonial contexts; however, they suggest critical concepts that draw on multiple disciplines and privilege inclusion. Often informed by notions of crossing, intersectionality, transition, and transformation, these terms contest exclusionary practices involving class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sex, among other variables. The word “limen,” from which liminality derives, designates threshold. The threshold functions simultaneously as both an obstructive barrier and an enticing opening for the entry into unknown, perhaps unknowable states that invite exploration. Both spatial and temporal, the liminal is a site of in-betweenness enabling non-normative perspectives. It is a site where difference becomes encounter as well as a location that resists assimilation while simultaneously allowing for the dynamic possibilities of fusion that hybridity embraces and articulates.

With the theme of “Liminal Spaces, Hybrid Lives,” the 2015 Triennial SSAWW Conference aims to celebrate the multiplicity of American women’s writing across a longstanding literary tradition that continues to be dynamic in contemporary times. The conference theme of liminality and hybridity, and the wide range of implications and meanings that these expansive concepts imply, will facilitate a process of encounters, engagements, and conversations within, between, among, and across the rich polyphony that constitutes the creative acts of American women. Thus, through a focus on liminality and hybridity, the 2015 SSAWW conference hopes to present the varied ways in which women, as critics, dramatists, educators, essayists, journalists, oral storytellers, poets, novelists, short story writers, and practitioners of both older and emerging forms, invent and reinvent the American literary and cultural landscape.

Possible topics involving the conference themes may include but are not limited to such keywords and ideas as:

Alienation and/or disillusionment as states of in-betweenness

Borders and peripheries

Boundaries between/within the built environment and/or the natural environment

Child, adult and blurring boundaries

Collaboration

Crossings

Cross-species encounters: human and animal relationships

Horizontal and/or vertical paradigms of social constructs

The hyphen

In between public and private or the semi-private, the semi-public

In between resilience and vulnerability

Historical constructions of space, place, home

Liminal spaces in the home

Immigration and/or citizenship

Inside and outside—the academy, the canon, etc.

Leadership from, on, within the margins

The mainstream and/or the subversive

The margin and/or the center

Mutations

Obscurity and celebrity

Outliers

Porosity

Pressures of normalization

Technology and the human

Transatlantic

Transcontinental

Transgender

Transgressions

The conference organizers welcome and encourage complete session submissions as well as individual paper abstract submissions. The cfp for complete panel submissions can be posted on the SSAWW website in addition to other venues of your choice. For posting on the SSAWW website, please send cfp to: ssaww2015.web@gmail.com.

We look to the 2015 conference to carry forward past achievements, and to create present and future opportunities for the growth of the Society and all its members with the understanding that inclusivity, in all its forms, intellectual rigor, and supportive outlooks are the responsibility of the entire membership. We look forward to hearing from you and receiving your submissions.

In an effort to provide researchers with an alternative source of information, the Encyclopedia of American Studies (EAS) has adopted an open access policy. Scholars and others studying American culture and society can now search the extensive database at http://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu free of charge. “The field of American Studies has changed a great deal since the print version of the encyclopedia was first released in 2001,” said EAS editor Simon Bronner. “We heard from scholars and institutions globally about access and realized we had the opportunity with a new format to keep up with the latest developments.”

The EAS is sponsored by the American Studies Association and hosted by the Johns Hopkins University Press, publisher of the ASA’s official journal American Quarterly. The online version first appeared in 2003. The encyclopedia home page received a new look to coincide with the switch to open access. Bronner explained some of these changes in a recent podcast http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/podcasts.html. The Encyclopedia has more than 800 online, searchable articles and accompanying bibliographies, related websites, illustrations, and supplemental material covering the history, philosophy, arts, and cultures of the United States in relation to the world, from pre-colonial days to the present.

“We wanted to show the institutional value of American studies as an interdisciplinary perspective which may not exist in other online resources,” said Bronner, chair of the American Studies Program and distinguished professor of American studies and folklore at Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg. “The Encyclopedia includes interpretive angles that show trends and ideas of research that may provoke a different line of thinking.” Bronner said that the editorial board of the Encyclopedia, which includes scholars from the U.S., Hong Kong and Switzerland, will work to continually update the site. He also said plans exist to expand the amount of multimedia content available to users of the Encyclopedia.